Pensions dashboards?

Blog started: 11 December 2014Last updated: 12 March 2019

What’s this all about?

Most of us build up money for our retirement through our work. But because we tend to have several jobs during our lives, we end up with multiple bits of pension savings in lots of different places. This makes it very hard to understand your overall position: in fact, 80% of the UK working age population aren’t sure about this – that’s 30 million people*.

Because of this problem, the Government, industry, academics, charities and others all think it would be a very good idea to develop “pensions dashboard” services, where UK citizens can see all of their different retirement savings in one place.

This issue exists in many developed countries – it’s not unique to the United Kingdom. Several countries are years ahead of us and have already developed online pensions dashboard facilities for their people (in Scandinavia, the Low Countries, Israel & Australia).

In 2014, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) recommended that a pensions dashboard should be developed, and in the 2016 Budget, the Government said it would ensure industry launched one. The industry then developed a prototype in 2017, but that highlighted a range of complex issues on which Government would need to opine.

So in 2018, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) conducted a feasibility study examining the issues involved, and then ran a public consultation on the topic. The consultation closed at the end of January 2019. The DWP received 125 responses to the consultation – about 12% of these were published in the public domain (you can see them listed on the 2019 page of this site).

Government hopes to publish a response to the consultation before Easter 2019, with a view to bringing forward dashboard provisions in a Pensions Bill later in 2019.

Developing and maintaining dashboard services for the whole UK will be fiendishly tricky. There are lots of issues to resolve requiring clever thinking and collaboration.

I hope that this website, serving as a repository for knowledge, thoughts and ideas on all aspects of the pensions dashboard topic, will help inform debate, and support those contributing to the pensions dashboard initiative.

See the About page for more details on why I’ve created this website and some brief background on me.

Many thanks for reading.

Richard Smith
12 March 2019

* In May 2018, the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association (PLSA) commissioned Populus Data Solutions to undertake an omnibus poll of c.1,500 UK individuals aged 18 to 65 to examine attitudes towards saving for retirement. The poll found that 8 out of 10 people aren’t sure they’re saving the right amount for retirement, based on what they’ve got already. At a national level, using the latest ONS figures available at the time, the non-retired UK population aged 18-65 was 38.0 million, 80% of which is 30.4 million.